The Adobe® Photoshop® CS4 11.0.1 update addresses a number of issues discovered after Adobe Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop CS4 Extended (11.0) software were released.The most significant fixes in the Photoshop CS4 11.0.1 update include the following:

- A number of issues that could cause slow performance have been addressed.
- Pen barrel rotation with Wacom tablets now works correctly.
- Photoshop now correctly recognizes 3D textures edited by a plug-in.
- The quality of the results of Auto-Blend Layers (Stack Images) has been improved.
- A problem that could result in a crash when pasting formatted text has been fixed.
- A crash that could result from a corrupt font no longer occurs.

The are no blending options in the channels palette, but is it still possible to blend? Yes, you can use Image / Apply Image, but I would like to show a different way.

In this example I have a copy of the green channel at the bottom of my channels palette. To blend this copy in overlay, I need to select the channel first with Ctrl+A (Command+C on the Mac) or in the menu: Select / All.

I then copy the image with Ctrl+C and paste it with Ctrl+V (Command+C and Command+V on the Mac).
As expected nothing happens. But it does allow us the use the fade command: Edit / Fade….

The fade command allows us to set the blending mode to overlay and after clicking on OK we’re blending the channel in overlay mode.

Note: blending channels can be very useful when you use channels to extract images from their background.

Picutel Smart Resize is a Photoshop plugin (only Windows supported for now) for advanced resizing of photos. Unlike ordinary resizing, Smart Resize can change the proportions (aspect ratio) of an image without introducing artifacts such as unnaturally tall or short people. This is accomplished by only rescaling the least interesting or important regions of the photo, leaving the more interesting regions untouched.

An example can be seen in the following video. At the top smart resizing is used, while ordinary resizing is shown at the bottom:

I’ve tested this plug-in with the following image:

I resized the image in Photoshop with Image/Resize, deselected Constrain Proportions and lowered the width from 500 to 300 pixels.

As you can see, the main subject is distorted.

I used the same original, but this time I resized with Picutel Smart Resize after making a selection around the girl first.

This time no distortion of the main subject. Slight distortions in the background can be easily corrected with cloning, but wait…. there is more.

You can even take it a step further and make multiple selections. In this example I included the big roll of hay in the background in my selection:

It doesn’t happen so often that you come across a plug-in that is actually useful. It’s not the ultimate solution, because in some cases you still need to do some cloning in the background, but regardless of this it’s still an impressive product and I’m looking forward to future developments.

Ever wondered why you don’t hear sound when you play a video in Photoshop CS3 Extended?
To play the video with sound, you need to hold down the Alt key (option key on the Mac) while clicking on the play button: